Smart Phone Photos and GPS

[Guest]

Hi allI've been hearing lately these disturbing reports that photos taken from a smart phone have the potential to also contain the gps coordinates of where that photo was taken.Under what circumstances will the photo also contain the gps coordinates? Does the phone need to have certain settings switched on before this will happen?I took this photo of an esky at my local boat shopcan anyone check this photo's file properties to expose the gps location where it was taken?My phone is a Samsung s4. To the best of my knowledge the phones gps settings have been turned off.Cheers.

[4THALOVE 45]

Hey Nanman can you turn the GPS function back on & post the same pic or take another photo The first pic you put up has no GPS info on it as far as I can tell I don't reckon they actually give you a pin point long and lat mark just general but with technology who knowsI know the charter blokes don't like phones on board and now even the digital camera has GPS in it Cheers 4THA

[Guest]

Cheers 4tha I'll get on to it bit later.

[bjorn2fish 4,612]

You may be able to keep the GPS on and just not apply the marks to photos taken on your phone, not sure what settings you can tweak on your phone though.Another thing, if you loaded your photo in software like Photoshop or equivalent and "saved it for the web", this will strip the meta data out of the photo like the GPS coordinates and also other info like, camera used, lense, iso's etc.The forum's upload script may even strip out the meta data, I haven't taken note if it does so it would be a good test.

[Kingsley 19]

I can confirm any photos uploaded to the forum have their metadata stripped out, which includes GPS locations.This topic has come up in the past, there's a couple of posts about it.http://www.strikehook.com/forum/27-boat-fishing/246780-4m-white-near-port-stanvac?start=15#247950http://www.strikehook.com/forum/5-general-fishing/144432-word-of-warning-about-taking-pics-on-your-phone?limitstart=0&start=15This is all the data in the picture above:http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.strikehook.com%2Fmedia%2Fkunena%2Fattachments%2F7780%2Fh1a4ca6e.jpg

[Ugly4Life 41]

If you're interested the process is called Geotagging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging"Geotagging (also written as GeoTagging) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes[1] or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names."A lot of modern cameras include Geotagging functions these days.

[Guest]

I just checked the settings on my Samsung s4 phone camera and noted that the GPS tag function was turned "off".Hopefully that means I'm Ok but you just can't trust the technology in these bloody things.